About Me

I am a software developer based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and at the same time I am much more than that. I am interesting foreign languages. Right now I primarily study Spanish and Esperanto, but I’ve also dabbled with Koine Greek and German. I write for a blog about learning languages along with two co-authors at Babelhut.com. I am a geocacher and spend much of my free time geocaching with my fiance.

I am those things, but I am also a software developer. I am not just a software developer at work though. I also write code at home and have been doing so since my dad brought home a Commodore 64 for me to play with. My interest in software development covers a broad range of technologies from Python to the Microsoft .NET platform to Java, Linux to Windows, PalmOS to Windows Mobile to Android, desktop to web to mobile, and many others.

I am involved with or have been involved with these projects:

RhinoSpike.com – This is my current and most active project. Together with my good friend Thomas Hjelm, we built a site for students of foreign languages to exchange audio recordings to aid in their study. From the initial idea to the site’s public launch took about 3 months using Python, Django, Pinax, and PostgreSQL. RhinoSpike continues to grow as we add more features, and was even mentioned by the New York Times in an article about learning languages online!

Barra de Español – This is a Firefox add-on which provides a toolbar full of useful links and functionality for people learning Spanish. I use this toolbar nearly everyday with my Spanish studies and it seems to be useful for others as well, with thousands of downloads by other Firefox users from addons.mozilla.org.

Pocket Freemind – This is an open source project I created so that users of the Freemind mind-mapping software could edit their mindmaps on Windows Mobile devices. It was written in C# using the .NET Compact Framework and has over 40,000 downloads on SourceForge.net.

Wabajump – This was an open source project written Java. It was an API similar to the Waba class library but allowed developers to compile their application directly into a PalmOS application using another program called Jump. This allowed developers to distribute their PalmOS applications as just one file rather than the four files that a typical Waba application required.

Head Coach and Squelch -The were two games I wrote for PalmOS using Java and Wabajump. I sold these games on PalmGear.com and managed to make some modest sales.

The above list is just what I’ve done that’s actually become visible to the outside world, outside of the work I do for my employers. If you are a potential employer and would like a copy of my resume, feel free to email me at peter at peterjcarroll dot com!